Susanta Ghosh

Midnapore, June 5: A CID team today joined West Midnapore police to investigate how the skulls and bones of at least five persons came to be buried at a spot near CPM leader Susanta Ghosh’s ancestral home in Garbeta from where they were unearthed yesterday.

“Preliminary investigations suggest that these are the bones of five or six persons,” West Midnapore police chief Praveen Tripathi said.

“We have received a complaint from local Trinamul Congress leaders that six persons were killed in a clash in 2002 at Piyasal in Keshpur, 35km from here, and that these could be their remains,” Tripathi said.

“One person has claimed that his father’s body was among the remains. We will have to carry out a DNA test to confirm this,” he added.

Ghosh, who was a minister in the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government, does not live in the Garbeta house. The spot where the bones were found is 600 metres from the house.

The police said clashes among Trinamul and CPM activists in Garbeta and neighbouring Keshpur had claimed several lives between 1998 and 2002. Many had also gone missing.

The six-member CID team, led by special superintendent Ashok Prasad, included a forensic expert. Parts of the remains were collected from the spot for further analyses.

The team spoke to some villagers, including Madan Santra, a former CPM worker who had led Trinamul activists to the spot yesterday.

Body found

The police today found a mutilated body of a man in a Binpur forest. They suspect that Maoists might have murdered him for being a police informer.